KUNG FU ON ULURU: ASIAN-AUSTRALIAN CINEMA

From its outrageous, pre-credit sequence – an absurdly situated drug deal at Uluru (referred to in the film as Ayers Rock) that culminates in an extended kung fu fight and car chase (also involving a helicopter) on and around the ‘rock’ – through to its literally explosive finale atop a Sydney high-rise, Brian Trenchard-Smith's international co-production, The Man from Hong Kong (1975), is a ground-breaking work of transnational Asian-Australian cinema and a prime example of 1970s ‘Ozploitation’ (a term that connects a diverse group of Australian genre films to international and transnational exploitation movie-making). The Man from Hong Kong also provides a significant point of connection to the ‘Australian international pictures’ of the 1950s and 1960s, the 1970s feature-film ‘revival’ – it was released in the key year of 1975 – and the boom in exploitation and genre-based commercial filmmaking in Australia in the late 1970s and into the 1980s enabled by changing funding mechanisms and ideologies. Like many co-productions and internationally financed features made in Australia, The Man from Hong Kong is a vanguard work that has been largely written out of nationalist and even postcolonial accounts of Australian cinema. As we will demonstrate in this final chapter, along with films such as The Overlanders (Harry Watt, 1946), The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960), Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971) and even Koya no toseinin (The Drifting Avenger, Shogoro Nishimura, 1968), The Man from Hong Kong needs to be included in any discussion of what constitutes Australian cinema under the transformations wrought by globalisation, postcolonialism, transnationalism and the fracturing of national identity. As the final film discussed in this book, it provides a bridge between the ‘Australian international pictures’ of the postwar era and the relative boom in transnational co-productions and globally-focused features that follow the ‘revival’. It is also an important, if contested, work within what Olivia Khoo, Belinda Smaill and Audrey Yue categorise as ‘Asian-Australian cinema’ (2013).

ENTER THE DRAGON: BRIAN-TRENCHARD SMITH, OZPLOITATION AND HONG KONG GENRE FILMMAKING

Writer-director Trenchard-Smith began his career in the UK before moving to Sydney, where he initially edited news footage and film trailers at Channel TEN-10 before moving to Channel 9 as promotions director.